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March 20, 2013

Google Keep, Now Available

Google Keep has been launched: it's Google's latest attempt to create a service for taking notes. Unlike Google Notebook, Keep is a Google Drive app (the Drive integration is not yet ready for public release), it doesn't have a rich-text editor and it's optimized for mobile.

There's an Android app and a desktop site. Both use the sticky notes metaphor and you can choose the color for each note, add text, images, lists and voice recordings that are automatically converted to text in the mobile app. Both interfaces let you choose between the grid view and the list view.

Google Keep lacks many of the features that were available in Google Notebook: labels, sorting, comments, multiple notebooks, rich-text editor, sharing. It looks like a lightweight Google Notebook for mobile devices.

"With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what's important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand," informs Google.

It's likely that each Google Keep note will be a file in Google Drive, so you'll be able to share it with other people, add it to a folder, download it etc.

For now, Google Keep is the only Google Drive service that has more features in the Android app than in the desktop interface.

BTW now I'm feeling happy because now I'm free form Google Reader's grips and happy with FeedDemon. The author or FeedDemon is going to release a last version of the software near the end of Google Reader.

I, with countless others, used to be a big fan of Google Notebook, but no number of angry or wailing posts could reverse Google short-sighted decision to kill it in 2009 (http://googlenotebookblog.blogspot.be/2009/01/stopping-development-on-google-notebook.html). So now they are starting with Google Keep? Good luck to them. I won't be fooled to feed my data to yet another of their system once again just to have it migrate away in a hurry a few years later. I am also stopping to use the excellent but dormant Google Tasks... I am sure it will be executed soon as well. No more trust in Google services.

I saw the post on Google Keep on my feed on Reader, so I posted it over on G+ with about the same thought. What did it take the success of Evernote for Google to realize - Gee... maybe people want to take notes after all? I'm still using Google Tasks, but it also has crossed my mind that they'll probably deep-six it also... especially the cool create a task from email function. At least when Google got rid of Notebook they pointed folks to Docs... but with Reader, they're just kicking people completely out of the Google-Sphere. I think G+ is great, but it doesn't replace the functionality of a RSS reader. Why doesn't Google just save everybody the unnecessary angst and keep Reader around until they figure out the solution that fits into their grand vision. All they are doing now is pissing off their most ardent customers...

I will not use it. I have lost trust in Google with anything other than their core business, i.e. search as for the rest it is questionable. Evernote works and of course notes is that companies core business.

Google let me down with notebook and now the appalling decision with with reader. Their fickleness is causing trust to waver. One has to conclude that this is just a short term app and will be killed off down the road.

This can be a really great App except that since the launch, I have lost two most recent notes. One was last Tuesday 26 Mar when I was taking a lot of notes on my Samsung Galaxy Note 2. When I came home and wanted to read it, most of what I had written down was missing.

Today, 3 days later, I was pasting a few items into a new note and a few minutes later, as I was going to review what I had pasted, the entire note was missing ?

Is there some history file somewhere, where I can retrieve such lost notes.